Ricky Ponting as Captain
Everything about Australian cricket is changing. Now it’s the farewells.
When Ricky Ponting’s predecessor as Australian captain, Steve Waugh, announced his retirement seven years ago, it involved more curtain calls than Frank Sinatra.
It turns out that Australians’ last sight of Ponting as a Test captain will be of him trailing off the MCG late last year, his leg stump tilted back like a fighter pilot’s joystick, having lingered for two hours over 20. His spirit was not broken, but one of his fingers was, so there was no farewell – assuming, practical man that he is, he would have fantasised of it anyway.
Ponting is thirty-six, in the prime of any life save the one that he chose, of professional sport. For some time as Australia’s captain, in fact, he has looked a man apart, his faded green and gold cap a contrast to the dark bottle green headgear of his younger comrades.
The successor to Allan Border as the cornerstone of Australian batsmanship has ended up leading Border’s captaincy career in reverse. Where Border inherited a mediocre team and left it on the brink of greatness, Ponting took over one of the strongest XIs ever marshalled and has watched it dwindle away until he is virtually its last representative, like a much-decorated general leading a salute in front of three boy scouts sharing two catapults.
That has not been his fault, but it has transpired on his watch. Australia’s giving up of the Ashes, the Border–Gavaskar Trophy and finally the World Cup have left an unfamiliar echo in the trophy cabinets at Cricket Australia.
Ponting is not quite finished, of course. He intends to play on as a batsman, and on the evidence of his rock-ribbed hundred in Ahmedabad last week, he can still summon great powers of concentration and adaptability. But his stepping down justifies the cliché ‘end of an era’, even if the new era begins as early as next week when Australia warm up in Fatullah for three one-day internationals against Bangladesh.
Only Greg Chappell and perhaps Neil Harvey among Australian batsmen can rival Ponting since Bradman, particularly because so much of his career has been spent in the vanguard batting position of number three, to which many are called but few are chosen.
His record stretches from horizon to horizon: 26,000 international runs with sixty-nine hundreds, 341 catches, ninety-nine Test victories – more than any other player in history. Ponting has also drummed out his runs at a rat-a-tat pace: 59.4 per hundred balls in Test matches; 80.5 per hundred balls in one-day internationals. At his peak, his batting was a pulse of Australian cricket – hearty, bouncy, vigorous.
Over the past two years, however, that pulse has grown thready. In his last twenty Test matches, he has averaged 35.8, and in his only hundred during that time, at Bellerive Oval, should have been caught at deep fine leg first ball by a cricketer now banned for deliberate underperformance. Before the last Australian summer, Ponting was invited to consider dropping down the order and declined it. He backed himself to perform in what he called in advance ‘potentially the biggest series I’ll play’. He failed – it could not be hidden.
Ponting has been a very Australian captain, in the sense once outlined by Neville Cardus: ‘The Australian plays cricket to win; he has usually left it to Mr Warner to make Empire-binding speeches.’ He was elevated because of his excellence as a batsman in both Test and one-day cricket rather than because of any evidence of strategic genius or flair for public relations. That didn’t really change. He put on no airs, added no graces, sought no publicity, cultivated no celebrity mates, declined to tweet. Leadership remained, for him, all about effect. That being so, he has not perhaps had the same reservoir of public affection to draw on as Border, Mark Taylor or Steve Waugh.
But we’re a perverse sporting public at times. It is odd that Michael Clarke has attracted criticism for being too polished, too image-conscious and a little too pleased with himself, and that Ponting has attracted criticism for the opposite. In fact, Ponting’s attributes are probably better appreciated by close-up peers than distant observers. He has always been, and remains, very much a cricketer’s cricketer. In his autobiography last year, Matthew Hayden penned a fond but perceptive portrait of the teammate he knew: a ‘bat nuffy’ who toyed obsessively with his equipment; a dressing room messpot who scattered his gear round ‘like a scrub turkey sorting its nest’; a ‘man of strong routine’ who repeated the same incantation to every partner he joined: ‘Good loud calls, mate.’
It could not be said of every holder of his office, but Ponting has always seemed like the kind of bloke with whom it would be good to play cricket, no matter the level. If you picked him in your club team, he would bat anywhere you asked and bring a decent afternoon tea. If he played for your opposition, you’d probably complain that he had ‘a mouth on him’, but also find that he was prepared to stick around for a beer at close of play.
When he delivered the Bradman Oration on the centenary of the Don’s birth, it turned out to be a surprisingly touching speech about his own cricket upbringing. During last year’s Bangalore Test match, he wore a black armband in honour of the late Ian Young, who gave nine-year-old Ponting a job as a scoreboard attendant at Launceston’s Northern Tasmania Cricket Association Ground.
As an on-field captain, Ponting may not quite have fulfilled initial hopes for him. His early boosters, Shane Warne among them, talked up his ‘cricket brain’, promising an innovator and aggressor. But when he didn’t have Warne or Glenn McGrath to whom to throw the ball, Ponting was prone to falling back on stereotyped ‘plans’; in fact, if a single word was uttered by his players more than any other, it was ‘plan’, to the point where they might have been involved in architecture rather than sport.
Statistically, his record stands comparison with any. His teams won sixty-two per cent of their Test matches, seventy-two per cent of their one-day internationals. But the best captains have a happy knack, a Nelson touch, a capacity for spinning straw into gold – or, as Harold Rhodes once said to Richie Benaud: ‘Benordy, if you stuck your head in a bucket of shit, you’d come up with a mouthful of diamonds.’ Ponting was never that kind of captain. He won consecutive World Cups when Australia was in full bloom, but subsequently lost three of four Ashes series, in two of which his team had the playing resources to win. Inserting England at Edgbaston in 2005 and failing to finish them off at Cardiff in 2009 cost him dearly.
His greatest attribute as leader was the example of his tremendous talent and professionalism, although this cut both ways. With runs under his belt, Ponting oozed authority; without them, he could look a tad forlorn. Nor did he remedy bad habits around umpires, about which he remained decidedly obdurate. ‘I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to stay mute, shrug my shoulders and accept bad mistakes as part of the game,’ he rationalised. ‘That’s not me.’ This meant that his final Test as captain will be remembered not only for its lacklustre result, but also for the hoo-hah over his haranguing of umpire Aleem Dar, who had given a decision that was in all likelihood perfectly correct. Although not obviously prone to the sensation, Ponting might in time come to regret the incident.
Ironically, given that his priority was always outcome rather than appearance, Ponting proved a better off-field captain than perhaps was appreciated. Ponting kept his private life private; he kept his public appearances dignified. He sold a multivitamin, but not himself. One look-see at the Indian Premier League was enough for him. He did not hang around and pretend to enjoy T20 for the sake of a few dollars.
Australian teams travelled well under him. He never lost his players’ respect and affection. He never lost his temper with a crowd – booed the length and breadth of England in 2009, he took it all in good part. Ponting also gave excellent, informative, straight-talking press conferences, managing to sound neither coached and contrived, nor affectedly colloquial and matey. The television soundbites seldom reflected it, but he could be droll and funny. His predecessor once referred to a roomful of journalists as ‘cockheads’. If Ponting thought that – and there were occasions on which he would have been entitled to – he kept it to himself.
At times last summer, he actually looked subtly at odds with the direction of Australian cricket, its overheated marketing, its overeager commercialism. When Ponting turned out for the announcement of the bloated seventeen-man Australian squad near the Sydney Harbour Bridge a full ten days before the First Test, he didn’t bother hiding his chagrin: ‘Unfortunately that’s what we’ve got. For some reason, Cricket Australia wanted to name the squad as early as they have. We’ve just got to get on with it.’
His image appeared on the cover of the Test match media guide holding a replica of the Ashes urn, but with all the ease and naturalness of someone holding up a can of deodorant – of which, of course, he had some experience back in the day. When he came to retire the captaincy, there were neither tantrums, a la Allan Border, nor tears, a la Kim Hughes, a la Michael Vaughan. There was instead a quiet, dark-suited dignity. So while Ponting might not have had the Sinatra farewell, he can certainly claim to have done it his way.
The Australian, March 2011